esmaspäev, veebruar 05, 2007

Veel erinevaid auhindu üle maailma

A contest to build a robot that can operate autonomously in urban warfare conditions, moving in and out of buildings to search and destroy targets like a human soldier, was launched in Singapore on Tuesday.

The country's Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) is offering one million Singapore dollars ($652,000) to whoever develops a robot that completes a stipulated set of tasks – yet to be revealed – in the fastest time possible.

DSTA said individuals, companies, universities and research institutes are all welcome to participate in the contest, dubbed the TechX Challenge, although foreigners must collaborate with local partners.

A George Mason University chemistry professor has won a $1 million engineering prize for developing a simple and inexpensive means of filtering arsenic from well water, an advance that is already preventing serious health problems in hundreds of thousands of people in his native Bangladesh and could help millions of others around the world.. . .His final creation -- an easy-to-make, maintenance-free, two-tiered system that uses sand, charcoal, bits of brick and shards of a widely available kind of cast iron -- removes virtually every trace of arsenic from well water. It wowed an independent panel of engineering academy judges who, under the rules of the prize, were looking for an affordable, reliable, socially acceptable and environmentally friendly solution to the arsenic problem that did not require electricity.